21. Liberty Researve

 

The impact of Liberty Reserve arrests

 http://cashisflowing.empowernetwork.com/blog/the-impact-of-the-liberty-reserve-arrests-and-the-seizing-of-libertyreserve-com-by-the-united-states-global-illicit-financial-team/

The immediate effect of the Liberty Reserve arrests and the seizing of LibertyReserve.com by the United States Global Illicit Financial Team is of course that all the funds in Liberty Reserve becomes unavailable for those that have accounts with funds in Liberty Reserve.
How long the funds in Liberty Reserve will be unavailable and if the accountholders will ever get their money is impossible to say for anyone. However, as I wrote in an earlier blogpost

While your memory is fresh you might want to write down everything you know about your Liberty Reserve account so you perhaps are better prepared if they should ever ask you things like: username, password, amount in account, your special text (which I always forget what really is called), who you received a payment from last and what it was for, who you paid last and what is was for etc..

To read the entire blogpost click here
One of the rumors described in that blogpost has now been proven to be untrue. In most cases only time can verify or disclaim the validity of rumors.
Most of the other posts I read about the Liberty Reserve closedown, the arrests of owner and other people involved, are focused on all the alleged criminal activities Liberty Reserve account holders are involved in. Not only the owners, but the customers. I find it highly annoying.

You are not a criminal for having a Liberty Reserve account.

The closing down of Liberty Reserve has an impact on honest ordinary people who used their Liberty Reserve account excactly how it was supposed to be used. To pay for services and products and to get paid for their own services and products.
Losing access to your money and being accused of being a criminal at the same time is no fun at all. Fortunately I had no money in my Liberty Reserve account. I just used it once as an emergency solution and then gave away what I had left in the account. Didn’t see a reason to leave the money in there when I had nothing I wanted to spend it on.
The Indictment actually states that virtually all of Liberty Reserve’s business derived from suspected criminal activity. Very easy to say of course, if you suspect that all activity was criminal activity.
This does not mean that anything has been proven.
One blogpost by Pierluigi Paganini has a quote:

“lying to anti-money laundering authorities in Costa Rica, pretending to shut down LIBERTY RESERVE after learning the company was being investigated by U.S. law enforcement, and moving tens of millions of dollars through shell-company accounts maintained in Cyprus, Russia, Hong Kong, China, Morocco, Spain, and Australia among other places.”
Click here to read the entire blogpost

Unfortunately I can’t see what the source for this information is, and would you actually tell someone in advance that you are investigating them and give them the opportunity to try to get away with funds?
In the middle of all this serious allegations of crime everywhere I can’t help myself when I find typos like this:

Budovsky and six other individuals ate the defendants.

A single letter can make so much fun.
But, who cares about the criminals?
I don’t care about what the criminals will do now.
If you have a Liberty Reserve account with funds in it I am pretty sure you don’t care about what the criminals will do now.

You only care about how to get your Liberty Reserve funds.

So far I haven’t seen anyone write a single word about how you can get your money back, or what you should do or who to talk to. Some does however have a more balanced view and admit that all users are not criminals, like DigitalJournal:

However, is every user of this service a cyber-criminal? The answer is no. While the owners of Liberty Reserve, Budovsky and his partner Vladimir Kats, used such service for money laundering, there are many legitimate businesses operating with this system.
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/351044#ixzz2WO4ILrVh

The article also tells that bitcoin had their US Dollar accounts seized in May 2013.
Jeffery Robinson states that the Feds laundered their own money through Liberty Reserve.. Watch the ABC interview here
Here’s a link to the indictment for those that like to read repetitive text.
Here’s another article you might want to read, which doesn’t brand you as a criminal if you had a Liberty Reserve account

I have my doubts about the closure of Liberty Reserve. It is widely reported to have had 1 million users. I am not yet convinced that a higher percentage of these were criminals, than is true in much of the click here to read more..

Please post below if you find any information about how ordinary people can get hold of their Liberty Reserve money. None of my searches has so far given my any results worth looking twice at.